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"In order to live free and happily you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice."
-Richard Bach
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Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.
-Jean Baudrillard
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Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.
-Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton
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Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?
-John Berger
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Living, just by itself --what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you...
-Louis-Ferdinand Celine, The narrator (Ferdinand Bardamu), in Journey to the End of the Night (tr. 1934; 1966 ed., p. 307), 1932
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There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. Nothing is more keenly required than a defence of bores. When Byron divided humanity into the bores and bored, he omitted to notice that the higher qualities exist entirely in the bores, the lower qualities in the bored, among whom he counted himself. The bore, by his starry enthusiasm, his solemn happiness, may, in some sense, have proved himself poetical. The bored has certainly proved himself prosaic.
-G. K. Chesterton, Heretics
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Boredom is not an end product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
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No society ever seems to have succumbed to boredom. Man has developed an obvious capacity for surviving the pompous reiteration of the commonplace.
-John Kenneth Galbraith
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America is said to have the highest per capita boredom of any spot on earth! We know that because we have the greatest number of artificial amusements of any country.
People have become so empty that they can't even entertain themselves. They have to pay other people to amuse them, to make them laugh, to try to make them feel warm and happy and comfortable for a few minutes, to try to lose that awful, frightening, hollow feeling--that terrible, dreaded feeling of being lost and alone.
-Billy Graham
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I fell asleep reading a dull book and dreamed I kept on reading, so I awoke from sheer boredom.
-Heinrich Heine
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There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society's ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom. In most all the descriptions of the periods preceding the rise of mass movements there is reference to vast ennui; and in their earliest stages mass movements are more likely to find sympathizers and support among the bored than among the exploited and oppressed. To a deliberate fomenter of mass upheavals, the report that people are bored stiff should be at least as encouraging as that they are suffering from intolerable economic or political abuses.
When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored. The consciousness of a barren, meaningless existence is the main fountainhead of boredom. People who are not conscious of their individual separatedness, as is the case with those who are members or a compact tribe, church, party, etcetera, are not accessible to boredom. The differentiated individual is free of boredom only when he is engaged either in creative work or some absorbing occupation or when he is wholly engrossed in the struggle for existence. Pleasure-chasing and dissipation are ineffective palliatives. Where people live autonomous lives and are not badly off, yet are without abilities or opportunities for creative work or useful action, there is no telling to what desperate and fantastic shifts they might resort in order to give meaning and purpose to their lives.
-Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (Part II - The Potential Converts; ch.10)
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If you're bored with life -- you don't get up every morning with a burning desire to do things -- you don't have enough goals.
-Lou Holtz
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Highly educated bores are by far the worst; they know so much, in such fiendish detail, to be boring about.
-Louis Kronenberger
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Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius, and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.
-Marilyn Monroe
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Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom. -- A theme for a great poet would be God's boredom on the seventh day of creation.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.
-Dorothy Parker
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It is the sin that believes in nothing,
cares for nothing,
seeks to know nothing,
interferes with nothing,
enjoys nothing,
hates nothing,
finds purpose in nothing,
lives for nothing,
and remains alive
because there is nothing for which it will die.
-Dorothy L. Sayers, "On Boredom"
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Boredom: the desire for desires.
-Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1877
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Books about Boredom
